<i>Kumar Talkies</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kumar Talkies Ashish Chadha (bio) Kumar Talkies (1998); DVD-R distributed by First Run/Icarus Films, 2000 Kumar Talkies is a meandering documentary about the only cinema theater in Kalpi, a nondescript, inconsequential town in northern India. Kalpi lies at the forgotten margins of postcolonial India, away from the alluring metropolitan center of Indian cultural modernity. A medieval market town shorn of its premodern imminence and now a waylaid bazaar of local agrarian produce and minor industries, it is here that the rustic Indian masses that consume the affective sensorium of Hindi cinema toil and subsist. Kalpi’s historical self-imagination is represented by this popular cinema as the battlefield where the rebellious queen of Jhansi valiantly fought the British during India’s first war of independence in 1857. Immortalized in the popular Hindi film Jhansi Ki Rani (1952), Kalpi sits on the edge of the Chambal Valley, a site often featured in 1960s dacoit, or “bandit,” films. Cinema in Kalpi is a part of the everyday banality of discreet pleasure and wasted desire. Cinema is indispensable for Kalpi, but it [End Page 163] has an ambivalent relationship to its people, who watch it on cable in the privacy of their bedrooms or in the town’s only theater. Kumar Talkies is their only source of public entertainment. Audiences trot to this ramshackle theater three times a day to see soft porn movies or gratuitous B-grade Bollywood masala fare. Often abruptly interrupted by power outages or missing scenes, these fragments of discontinuous cinema are conspicuously consumed by the subaltern working class of Kalpi. Projecting scratched and faded celluloid through a rickety projector with screechy sound, Kumar Talkies is a family operation catering to the unfulfilled gratification of the town’s apathetic men folk. Director Pankaj Rishi Kumar enters this social sphere of debased pleasure and inconsequential propensity to document, almost with ethnographic acuity, the place of cinema in small-town India, far away from the glamorous enthrallment of Bombay into the dusty turgidity of northern India. Trained as an editor at the Film and Television Institute of India, Kumar began his career as an assistant editor on the celebrated film Bandit Queen (1994). Subsequently disillusioned with the mainstream Indian film industry, he made this 16mm documentary with his own money to fathom the seductive allure of the cinematic pleasures that had ensnared him. Kumar Talkies begins as a seemingly conventional documentary intervention to unobtrusively explore the role of cinema in a provincial, nonmetropolitan India, but slowly and unmindfully, the film descends into the domain of the personal. The decrepit, monkey-strutting, pigeon-infested theater was actually a gutted lentil mill that Kumar’s father inherited and, in 1969, transformed into a talkie. Kumar uses the theater as an emotional conduit to make forays into his own family history, both to examine his quirky love of cinema inherited from his father, a retired government official, and to explore the role of cinema in Kalpi during the emerging twenty-four-seven cable television onslaught of the late 1990s. Kumar adeptly excavates the pedestrian geography of his ancestral town to make a documentary that navigates his autobiography to tell a tale about cinema. In the film, his obsession with cinema, his father’s fetish with films, and Kalpi’s love for cinema all collapse into a single narrative that comments on the affective role of cinema in contemporary India. The family in Kumar Talkies provides the film with a personal locus around which the affective narrative of the documentary is woven. Kumar’s father had recently died, and Kumar uses the documentary as a memorial to his father’s fascination with cinema as well as to address his own susceptibility toward the medium. Kumar subtly ties his infective relationship to cinema as a filmmaker to the emotive bond that he shared with his father as the only one of three sons to choose cinema as a profession. The search for what cinema means to Kalpi’s inhabitants becomes a metaphor for Kumar’s own quest, mirrored in his delicate excavation of his deceased father’s eccentric obsession. The documentary is driven by a sense of poignancy—the story of a...